While Ben first sees this as good riddance to his browbeating wife and the trouble making Junior, he soon notices signs that Junior is not the monster he appeared.
He is on the verge of cracking until Beck arrives at the house, posing as Junior's uncle, and decides to kidnap his faithful correspondent, along with Flo for ransom. However, Junior becomes upset that his parents were going to send him back and despite Ben stating that he will not, drives Flo's car into her father-in-law's store, and Ben's bank account is wiped out to pay for the damage. However, upon hearing he was returned thirty times, he decides to keep and love him, something no one has ever done. Ben is having serious doubts about Junior, and decides to take him back to the orphanage. Finally, he displays his effective but unethical method for winning in Little League where he strikes rival players in the crotch with a baseball bat. Junior however wants revenge and sneaks a lawn sprinkler in her room, cuts off another girl's ponytails with scissors, puts a frog in the punch bowl, replaces Pinata candy with pickles including the juice, throws her presents in the pool and places fire crackers in her birthday cake making it blow up.īen seeing Junior is upset gives him his most precious possession, a dried prune that belonged to his grandfather (he thought it resembled Roosevelt), telling him it signifies a bond between two people. Junior then goes on to terrorize his neighbor's birthday party, after Lucy, the snobby birthday girl, bans him from the magic show. He makes Ben believe a bear is attacking the campground when it is really Roy in a bear suit. Junior messes up a camping trip with the neighbors by urinating in the fire, and manipulating a practical joke played on the kids by their father, Roy. Big Ben ends up falling down the stairs, and the house catches on fire.
PROBLEM CHILD 1990; ROY SERIAL
However, Junior is hardly a model child apparently mean-spirited and incorrigible, he leaves a path of serious destruction in his wake, and is even pen pals with Martin Beck ( Michael Richards), a notorious serial killer called the Bow Tie Killer.
Ben approaches less-than-scrupulous adoption agent Igor Peabody ( Gilbert Gottfried) with his dilemma, and Igor presents them with a cute 7-year-old boy, Junior ( Michael Oliver). He would love to have a son, but his selfish, gold-digging wife Flo ( Amy Yasbeck) has been unable to conceive. Recently, he has discovered that his father intends to sell his store and the land to a Japanese company rather than leave it to him when he asks why, Big Ben reveals that it is because his son "stubbornly refuses to follow example" by adopting an honest work ethic instead of a ruthless drive to usurp.
From there, he is repeatedly discarded at various homes throughout many years by guardians who have grown tired of his destructive behavior-which includes demolishing a mobile home with a bulldozer in retaliation for his favorite toys being stepped on-until he is eventually deposited at a Catholic orphanage, where he continues to wreak havoc on the strict nuns.īen Healy ( John Ritter) is a pleasant but brow-beaten husband working for his father Big Ben ( Jack Warden), a tyrannical sporting goods dealer who is running for Mayor. The film opens with a woman leaving a bassinet on the porch of a fancy home the baby, named Junior, promptly urinates on the woman who picks him up.